“It was such a shock to the local community,” said Gordon James, then director of Friends of the Earth in Wales.
“I remember going down to Tenby and seeing the beautiful North Beach covered in black and there were people there in tears.
“We set up a legal team and we interviewed a lot of people… and the evidence was damning.
“The tugboat men and the marine pilots, they’d issued warnings that safety was being compromised [at the port], there were cutbacks and they were saying more or less it’s a disaster waiting to happen.”
An inexperienced pilot had been tasked with taking the tanker into Milford Haven and “then we learnt that the radar [at the port] hadn’t been working properly for months”.
Milford Haven Port Authority was eventually fined £4m, which at the time was the biggest penalty ever issued for a pollution case in Britain.
It was later reduced on appeal to £750,000 to enable the port to make changes to improve safety.